Snowflake Challenge, Day 12 (+Unconventional Courtship Generator)

[john_amend_all]

I was rather busy at the weekend and missed snowflake_challenge days 10 and 11. I'll have to come back to them at some point. For now, though, number 12 is delightfully apposite.

Day 12

In your own space, talk about what you bring to fandom. It can be something tangible, or not. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I think that my contributions can be mainly summed up in two links: fanfic and random prompt generators. OK, there's a bit more than that; I sometimes annoy people with nitpicky forum posts, or muck about with doll generators or image macros, but they're very much a minor element.

What makes this question so appropriate for today is that I've just uploaded quite a significant update to the Unconventional Courtship Random Generator. New features include:

• You can specify both characters. So if you only want 10/Rose prompts, or Blake/Avon prompts, or Sapphire/Uhura prompts for all I care, you can have them.
• You can get a list of all the prompts the generator knows.
• You can add your own characters! Either just one, or an ensemble. The character names get stored in the URL, so you can set up a list and then bookmark it for future use.
• This was intended more for debugging, but if you're in love with one particular prompt, you can ask for endless variations on it.

Comments

[aralias]

i am very excited about all the new features! i was going to post a reply to your original comment, but this is a good place to do it instead :D thank you for putting all this work into it - it's a great tool, and i have spent many happy hours lolling over it. the idea of adding your own characters is particularly neat.

i'll try and get you some more prompts over the course of the month... (though really, there are a lot now!)

[john_amend_all]

'Add your own characters' was something I've wanted to do for a while, but I couldn't think of a good way to do it until I realised I could have a separate form to set them up rather than try to stick everything on the same page.

[thisbluespirit]

Wow, that is quite an impressive lot of shiny additions! I especially like being able to make it cough up pairings, and also the make your own list part. I had a trial run with a lot of 60s people last night. The results were even scarier than usual (I should never put Frank Marker in a random generator), but a lot of fun.

:-D

[john_amend_all]

Specifying a pairing was what aralias originally asked for, and once I'd started tinkering I began to think "It wouldn't be much of a stretch to add this or that feature while I'm here..."

Of course, even when you force a pairing on it, it doesn't necessarily get the people the 'right' way round :-) For example, prompt 237 with Kirk and Spock (or Jamie and Zoe, or Tegan and Nyssa) works beautifully one way round, and not at all the other.

Ace and Dayna's exploding wedding night, on the other hand, seems about the same whoever's who.

[liadt]

Amazing! Bored people everywhere thank you for your generator tinkerage:)

[john_amend_all]

Nice to know I've justified my existence for one more day.